Director's Weekly Reports

The week we were reminded that Earth shares the solar system with other objects. The Moon passed between the Sun and Earth on Tuesday night (our time) and produced a solar eclipse visible in its totality from Indonesia. And one day earlier, asteroid 2013 TX68 – 20 to 50 m across – passed within about 4 million kilometers of Earth (http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2013-tx68-uncertain-trajectory-closest-earth-mar-5-2016), about 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Arriving at Lamont this week was Jonathan Kingslake, a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Jonny received his Ph.D. in glaciology in 2013 from the University of Sheffield, where he studied subglacial water flow and outburst floods with Felix Ng and Grant Bigg. As a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey between then and now, he led field expeditions to West Antarctica to document annual changes in ice sheet structure and longer-term ice flow patterns with phase-sensitive radar measurements.

The Weekly Report this week is shorter than usual because I spent much of the week off campus. From Wednesday to Friday I attended a meeting of the GRAIL Science Team hosted by the University of Hawai’i. The highpoint of the meeting was a daylong field trip, led by Jeff Taylor and Peter Mouginis-Mark of the university’s Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, of the deposits and structures of the Ko’olau volcano in southeastern Oahu.

Once again we experienced a week bookended by a snowstorm, this one at the end rather than the beginning. Once again, our Buildings and Grounds crew were in early today to clear roads, paths, and parking lots even as the snow continued to fall.

This week began with a snowstorm that set accumulation records at several locations across the northeastern U.S. The brunt of the storm arrived Saturday, and by mid-morning Sunday the skies were clear. That schedule permitted our crew from Buildings and Grounds to clear all the pathways, roads, and parking lots by the start of work on Monday morning, an amazing transformation of the campus that required long weekend hours on the part of many.

This week marked the first campus snowfall of this winter season. Notwithstanding the limited accumulation, our Buildings and Grounds staff were in early Thursday morning to ensure that roads, sidewalks, pathways, and parking lots were clear and safe.

It has been another holiday-shortened week, one in which temperatures in the New York City area returned to seasonal levels after the record-setting highs of last week. A CNN blog by Adam Sobel (http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/25/opinions/sobel-warm-december/), posted on Christmas Day, explained that the high December temperatures in the eastern U.S.

On the heels of a Paris Climate Summit at which the world’s nations agreed to address greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in a serious and collective fashion (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate-change-accord-paris.html?_r=0), many from Lamont headed to San Francisco this week to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. With more than 24,000 attendees, the meeting is once again the largest in our field this year.

It has been a busy week: the last full week of classes, the last week of the Paris Climate Summit, and the last week before the start of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. It was also the last week of the continuing resolution that has funded the U.S.

Last week’s report began with a look ahead to the climate summit in Paris at the end of the month, written in ignorance of the events of that evening that would push climate change off the front pages as the world focused instead on global terrorism. To the friends and family of the victims of the horrific events in Paris last Friday, as well as the parallel events earlier in Lebanon and Egypt, go our condolences and our steadfast support.

This week was one of heightened anticipation for the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that will begin in Paris at the end of the month.

If the importance of campus issues can be measured by the frequency of staff comments, then the most urgent issue for Lamont has been the poor state of repair of our campus roadways. The highlight of the week must therefore be the substantial completion of the first phase of repaving, including the entrance road, the roads around the Geoscience parking lot, and the road alongside Geoscience, the New Core Laboratory, Guest House 6, and Buildings and Grounds.

The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the entire Lamont Campus was deeply saddened by the news that Missy Pinckert passed away on Tuesday morning. Missy had served as an Administrative Aide in the DEES Administrative Office at Lamont since 1982.